For many years, whenever people ask me how I get their children so excited about learning, I’ve wanted to joke that my secret sauce is a certain amount of benign neglect. While I’ve said this to a few parents that I have very close relationships with, it’s obviously not a great joke to make—and I’m not talking about neglect in any form—but I’ve struggled to find a better term for what I do. Until now.
Harriet Pattison, in her book Rethinking Learning to Read (which I highly recommend for anyone who is interested in the question of how children acquire literacy) uses a term that perfectly encapsulates this secret sauce: positive non-interference.
““Other parents argued that it was specifically their contribution to leave children alone:
’It is best when adults are in the background, only offering assistance when asked’
...’Get out of their way.’
...Such a strategy might be called positive non-interference and stands in contrast to the conventional interventions of education in which children are to be helped, guided and supported almost continuously by adults towards inevitably adult goals.””
As Pattison points out elsewhere in the book, the American approach to solving problems in schooling (and parenting) is always more interference: more teaching, more assessing, more scheduling. To do otherwise would be seen as neglectful.
The trouble with this interventionist strategy is that it ignores children’s need for autonomy. Besides causing a great deal of stress—and sometimes leading to worse performance—all this teaching and assessment puts children in a position that threatens one of the core needs of human beings: control over one’s own time and goals. (For more on this topic, I recommend William Stixrud and Ned Johnson’s book The Self-Driven Child.) My own observation of children is that they can instantly sniff out when we are trying to impose our own goals on them, and when this happens, their first priority is to protect their autonomy. This means that a child might reject a potential interest (or even an abiding passion) if they sense the adults around them are trying to push the child deeper, elicit better performance, or use the interest for their own ends.
Even in a Montessori context, once we break the trust children have that our offerings are simply that—offerings—and not obligations, they will no longer suspend their doubt to see if maybe we have some interesting ideas. This is why I am so opposed to obligatory follow-up work. If lessons come with an obligation to keep do more of whatever is offered, they are no longer gifts. This is rather like a nosy relative who gives you a really ugly vase, then comes over to your house and asks why that you haven’t given it a place of honor and changed your decor to match it.
Finally, this interventionism is based in a lack of trust. No one likes being told constantly that they are untrustworthy. At its heart, the message our interventions give children is: “you can’t be trusted to figure out what you need to know, and even if you are, you’ll never be able to learn it if we don’t teach it to you.” But this neither true nor a universal view of children:
“The social anthropologist David Lancy looking across a wide sweep of ethnographic evidence puts forward the argument “that active or direct teaching/instruction is rare in cultural transmission” (Lancy, 2014, p 205). He goes on to assert that “one of the most unequivocal findings re childhood from the ethnographic record is children learning their culture without teaching” (Lancy, 2014, p 209 italics original). Indeed, active teaching is a rarity or at least very strategically used away from Western society, necessitating as it does the concentrated overseeing from an adult who is then unable to pursue his or her own ends (Lancy, 2014).”
Lancy goes on to say that children throughout the world are extremely successful at learning a full range of cultural skills and ideas through observation, experimentation, and collaboration with peers. While he doesn’t directly address the learning of deeply abstract skills like reading, Pattison does, as does Peter Gray in his book Free to Learn and in his online column Freedom to Learn. How do children learn to read? Mostly they figure it out for themselves, and they ask for help when they need it. They learn when it’s useful to them: because they want to do something other people are doing, or because friends and family have gotten tired of reading aloud to them. This is even true, or perhaps especially true, of children diagnosed with dyslexia.
Does all this mean we should never offer children any lessons? Never introduce them to phonics or math? NO. But it means we should remember our place. We offer, the children decide whether and where to put that gift in their mental house.
And when children are busy with their own business, we can get the hell out of their way.
P.S. This week we are starting a book club on Free to Learn over at Deschooling Ourselves. Come join us! It’s completely free to participate.